Epic happy to work with Microsoft on HoloLens 2 open platform

Epic Games and Microsoft haven't always seen eye to eye, and you probably heard that Epic's CEO Tim Sweeney mercilessly ripped into Windows RT for blocking competing stores. Microsoft changed their tune though, so Sweeney and Co followed.

Sweeney mentioned that Microsoft's insistence on a closed platform pretty much made them natural enemies, which is why they decided against Unreal Engine support in the original Holo Lens.

Holo Lens 2, however, is an open platform so Epic are onboard. "Microsoft expressed genuine interest in approaching augmented reality as an open platform, rather than a walled garden like iOS where you can only install apps through their official store and they take out a large fraction of the money", Sweeney said.

Epic's CEO is delighted with the new wave of Microsoft's leadership, as they showed great interest in adopting open principles. In fact, if you factor in GitHub, Microsoft is among the top open source contributors in the world.

"There's a growing recognition throughout the whole industry now the open platforms are an important thing and that we have to continue to prioritize ensuring they remain open, and so Epic is incredibly happy", he said.

Sweeney said that there's been a time when everyone looked at Apple's monopoly and 30 per cent cut with envy, whereas today they're being criticised for it, as the trust in open platforms grew significantly.

Microsoft's Holo Lens 2 will be an open platform, leaving it to users to choose which store they want to use. Unreal Engine 4 support for native apps is coming with the 4.22 version, and Epic's dev team has been hard at work to make everything run great.

"There's an immediate need for highly convenient real-time product visualization that gets you as close to viewing the real product in the real world as possible, Sweeney mentioned.

Microsoft
Microsoft, HoloLens 2

We're not sure whether Sweeney was informed that Microsoft Holo Lens 2 has a military contract as well, which was recently protested against by Microsoft's employees who claim they didn't sign up to develop weapons.